Blog Design Update

Maybe I should have said better taste, less filling.

If you're a frequent Design Matters reader, you probably noticed the new design we rolled out yesterday. It's been 4 years since we first launched Design Matters as Lenovo's first blog. It's hard to member exactly what other things we were working on way back in 2006. It's been a great experience for me. I've learned a lot about social media, and certainly have grown as a blogger, but the design of the blog has never changed. I participated highly in the original design to ensure it had the right look and feel out of the gate. I knew that future readers would be very interested in ThinkPad and what made design tick at Lenovo. The blog design needed to connect to that audience. In retrospect, I think we did a good job, but it's hard to not reach for improvements. Designers just can't stop designing. The new design adds some important social media links and usability features to a new comments bar. It's now very easy to share a blog either with Twitter or Facebook and stay connected with your followers and friends. Bookmarking a favorite blog for future reference is a simple click away. You can also finally print a specific blog without burning up your printer with a zillion unwanted pages. This has driven me crazy since the beginning.

I love the tiny icons on the comment bar that help you select what you want to accomplish

The right hand column now includes thumbnail images related to past posts, my Twitter feed, and the Lenovo Youtube and Picasa feeds. These are very useful for keeping aware of what Lenovo is serving up in the digital world. My Tweets are primarily about what I call the #designoftheday or new blog postings. I rarely have much else to say on Twitter. We also updated the appearance to visually tie all the blogs together via a synergistic design thread. Originally the mastheads had been created one off as needed basis. We finally got the time to step back, take a deep breath, and rethink them all at once. It's important to rethink things every so often in the context of the big picture. The new mastheads have consistant typography, color palette and medium grey thematic imagery. Spots of color punch up

the overall look.

Sampling of a few of the new masthead designs currently in use, more are coming

I really like the nerd glasses metaphor for Matt Kohut's blog, Inside the Box. It just seems to fit with the "computer enthusiast" moniker. Does anyone else remember the classic Are you a nurd? poster published by National Lampoon in the early 80's? No offense Matt, we still love you. Hope you enjoy the changes we made. Let me know if you have suggestions on how to make it even better. David Hill